Pays au dela

"As to the natural parts I have, of which this is the essay, I find them to bow under the burden; my fancy and judgment do but grope in the dark, tripping and stumbling [wobbling] in the way, and when I have gone as far as I can, I am in no degree satisfied; I discover still a new and greater extent of land before me, with a troubled and imperfect sight and wrapped up in clouds, that I am not able to penetrate." Montaigne-"On the Education of Children"

My domain name, "Pais au dela," is the original French translated here as "extent of land before me." My goal for this page will be to explore, in an ambling way at times, the great land before me hoping to find clarity as I advance. I will focus centrally though not exclusively on mental health issues in my stumbling march forward.

Monday, June 24, 2013

Empathy, the concept comes back again and again in my thoughts. I try to see
the world as you. You try to see the world as me. Before ever really
concentrating on the term “empathy” itself, I’d long thought of reading and
writing fiction as two powerful ways to loosen the hold of our own self-focused
perspective and get a glimpse of what it’s like to be someone else. Or at least
I hoped they might be.Empathy, though, has at times seemed an idealistic dream to me, or a gift of the
uber-talented privileged few. We can’t possibly understand everything about
someone else’s experiences of the world. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—where a narrating voice hovers around a summer
vacation home able to slip in and out of the minds of the people gathered
there—was an exception. And so was James Joyce’s “Molly” chapter at the end of
Ulysses that traces in minute detail
the insomniac movements of a women trying to fall asleep one early morning in turn of the century Dublin. Empathy writing is tricky. Having never himself experienced a sleepless night
as an insomniac wife, Joyce could be way off in his “Molly” chapter. And when
she created Charles Tansley, what did Virginia Woolf actually know about being
a young common born philosophy student, with a chip on his shoulder about his social standing, vacationing with his
famous mentor and his mentor’s upper class family? I pose skeptical questions
about whether character creation tells us much about what it’s like to walk in different shoes and feel the world from a third person perspective, and yet, without
any precise explanation at the moment of exactly how the process works, I do
still believe that Joyce and Woolf’s imaginative ventures gave us valuable
insight about living in the world with other people.Empathy reading can also be tricky. We can easily over-generalize and arrive
at erroneous conclusions about what an author has done when writing about the world
from someone else’s perspective. With Joyce, I’m tempted to
overreach and say he has written an account of what it’s like to be a woman
from a man’s perspective. But he hasn’t. He’s written a very specific
fictitious account of a small slice of time for one woman living in a very specific time and place in history. The “Molly” chapter has not captured
the essential experience of womanhood. It’s simply a hypothesis, one
possibility, postulating how one made up woman might feel in one limited context.
And having stumbled across that term “womanhood,” my head begins to spin. So
many different possibilities, so many different contexts in which to be a woman,
could there possibly be a way of defining a condition that encompasses them all
and conveys to us men who do not know firsthand what it’s like to be a woman? Time transforms every situation, and the possibilities for framing another person's place in the world seem nearly infinite. We can always add, expand, narrow, or remove
an element and create a new and slightly altered place to understand. What is it like to be
black? What is it like to be a child? What is it like to be an 8-year-old girl growing
up in an advanced technological information saturated era ? How does it
feel to be a young black girl living in an affluent suburb of Atlanta where 75% of the students at your school are white? Relating to others would be
simple if there were a stock set of 4 or 5 different types of people to
understand. But in the detailed experience of day to day living, we slip fluidly
in and out of 100’s of categories, 1000’s of overlapping, concentric, and
entirely separated circles in the ever shifting Venn diagrams of our identities. Empathy’s hard because it takes constant reassessment of the endlessly
complex and rich experiences that add up to make us who we are. This post has
been rather slow in developing, and along the way, I’ve done a little bit of
reading about fiction and empathy. There is an expansive academic literature on the
subject. In her article “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions,” Amy
Coplan provides in one of her footnotes a workable solution that addresses the
complexity of empathic thinking: “Rarely, if ever, would we be able to
imaginatively experience everything that the other experiences since it would be virtually impossible to have awareness of all of the
target’s unconscious thoughts, desires, beliefs, and so on. This does not mean,
however, that we cannot imaginatively experience a close approximation of the
dominant thoughts and feelings that the target experiences at a particular
moment in time.” I had a strange and revealing reaction to this footnote,
conflicting emotion that clarified for me some of my own expectations about how
I want to relate to other people, a blend of hope and disappointment. Coplan
reassures with her insistence that empathy is possible despite the complexity
of other people. But her affirmation is only partial. Empathy is limited and
temporary. We get only a “close approximation” at “a particular moment in
time.” And something in me demands more. A low whispered taunt tells me this is not enough, that I’m settling if I accept these limits. This reaction seems a
strange manifestation of perfectionist thinking, and in a leap that is not fully
articulated, I wonder if my disappointment is somehow linked to possessive
desire (Help! I'm an epistemophiliac!) A question for another day. No place here to delve into musings about how we know what we know. This prologue has gone on long enough, and
I’ve not yet arrived at what I’ve really been wanting to address: the ways
guilt obstructs empathy and prevents healing relationships between depressed
people and the friends and family who support us when we’re down.A suivre…

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Seeping lava oozing and solidity of the surface beginning to
dry and harden into place. Several billion years of earth always shifting. A
life. An eye blink. A single instant of stillness. A snap shot a mere 80
years wide. Permanent light written onto silver bromide plates objectively
captures the whole picture. Ca a été. Motionless and complete. Save the
blurry splotch down at the bottom. And the unnamed forms halfway jutting into
the upper left corner. A half road towards virgin forests unexplored? What lies
just beyond the frame? A life that could have been? A cosmic finger slipped accidentally in front of the lens? The angle of the shot, some say, makes all the
difference.

A river centuries deep cuts the banks steadily migrating
several feet to the left over 20 years, steady drift that never arrives.
Unnoticeable change finite and constant where billions of years ago a dry
colossal mass of rock and dust hover in space and time. A hot loud bang diced
the rock. Jagged, two parts slipped to either side of a miniscule fissure, at
first imperceptible, separating what heavens vault had originally cracked.

Time passes. With cartoon like fluidity, the fissure yawns
apart. Two sublime and daunting stones repel each other and float divided by
emptiness out further and further towards opposite ends of existence. Slowly
the momentum dwindles and eventually comes to a full stop. The rocks spin
wildly in place, out of synch, unguided, heads flipping and rotating, pointing
sometimes up or down or backwards, momentarily towards and then back away from
each other. A blade of grass dwarfed by light years sprouts from nothing. Faint
sounds of water trickle intermittently.

The rocks are still and nearly aligned, several inches
closer to each other maybe, but on this scale, it’s hard to tell. The blade of
grass lengthens and several others appear. Sounds grow louder, some
indistinguishable, potential signs of animated life or simply expanded notes of
the mineral stream passing. The rocks are closer—it is clear—and moving again,
slowly accelerating back towards their starting place. Several drops develop
scattered with large empty gaps between them. Elements on mismatched scales are
converging, negotiating the steps of coherence. Drops expand into puddles their
blurry edges filling up the blanks between them, and pushed by the force of
approaching stone, puddles find each other and flow together. Things are moving
fast now. Lush vegetation bursting open. Rocks lengthening and flattening.
Distinct rustlings in the brush. A steady rush of water audible as the stream shades in a final remaining hole at its center.

The edges of land and river are close. Water spills outward in all
directions, an uneven ameba-like advance searching for a barrier. A first foot splashes
aground and fills up the stone's outer contours. Then another upstream, and
another and another. All along the shore where water touches rock, the flow
recedes back towards the river’s center, spinning as it retreats coloring in
the last remaining gaps to form unbroken contiguous banks fixed and
reestablished back where we know them.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

We lose parts of ourselves when we get depressed. Things
that we enjoy when healthy become bland, insipid, slightly nauseating
counterfeits that no longer light us up the way they did in the past. The late
fall arrival of the Oscar contenders in the theaters. Talking about fascinating
books with friends over filet mignon at our favorite restaurant. A bike ride
through the Bois de Vincennes. Auburn wins the national title we’ve waited 25
years to see. C’est tout un. A
resoundingly indifferent and drained“whatever” supplants the joyful responses you’d expect in these
situations. The clinical term for this condition is “anhedonia.” On a neurological level, we
lose our ability to feel pleasure, a condition that makes it considerably
difficult to do anything about depression. It’s very hard to stay active (a key
component of fighting depression) when the things that should cheer you up
don’t.

When I crashed in the fall of 2010, I forgot how to teach.
Before my infernal season, I had taken great pride in my work as a language
teacher and my efforts to plan creative, engaging classes that prompted
students to practice their language skills while also allowing them to express
things that were important to them. I transformed very rapidly that fall from a
proud, inspired, and aspiring educator, to a shelled out vacancy sloughing
through everything half-asleep and gasping. I no longer felt I could motivate
or connect with my students, and a disturbing fog of loss and inadequacy
latched tight around me. Every step felt 30lbs too heavy, like I was carrying a
log pressing down hard on my neck. Every breath felt like I was only getting
half the oxygen I needed. (Recently, I heard a man on television say that this
feeling is like wearing a lead trench coat all the time.) I sat for hours stiff
and empty in front of a blank computer screen searching for the next day’s
lesson and producing nothing. At times, my mind swung from that stifled,
lifeless stare into accusing recriminations, asking what the fuck was
wrong with me and why I couldn’t just get my work done.

Things got really ugly for me at work that semester. Several
days while trying to work on planning in my office, I punched myself in the
head over and over progressively harder towards a deranged frenzy thinking that
the blows might somehow free me from the breathless stagnation I was wading
through. I locked up completely several times unable to speak in front of my
classes. Something like a panic attack. Not the heavy breathing and heart
racing feeling exactly, but long physically painful silences where my brain jammed
and struggled to find every word, where I had to fight hard against my mouth
and throat and lungs that defiantly resisted making each sound. One day in the
language lab, the state of the art West German cassette equipment bugged
during a lesson—yes the machines were marked “Made in West Germany,” in 2010. I had a moment of panic; seized, immobile,
pressure jam clogging of the brain, and then dreadful relief. Relief looking
out the window over the dull grey mediocrity of the Paris suburbs and the once promising
social housing cabbages telling myself the chaos of equipment malfunction
didn’t matter because as soon as the course was over I was going to climb up to
the top of the building and jump.

This is an example of the gruesomely
ridiculous logic of suicidal thinking. Tiny insignificant things, things we
have no control over and that aren’t even our fault, come to hurt so badly that
our clogged and distorted reasoning, corrupted by pain, tells us that death is
the only way to stop hurting. Gruesomely stupid indeed, but in the moment
it makes absolute sense.

*****

A year and a half later in January 2012, I was not fully
healed but much better. I had limped most of the way back from my most terrible
and desperate state. I had recently gotten involved volunteering at my local
chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and the office director
suggested I do the training to become a Family
to Family instructor. This training session ended up being a most valuable
gift of experience after my bout with depression had convinced me that I no
longer knew how to teach well like I had loved doing before;
like the day a group of French 18 year-olds got excited talking in English about whether poetry
makes anything happen and decided that it can but must adapt to the times and
ever changing audiences in order to do so. That old self (moi d’alors) that could run a discussion like that had slumbered
invisible and homeless hidden deep inside me for over a year.

Our trainers Sue and Linda were complete strangers at the
beginning of the weekend and good friends three days later. Thinking about our
interaction over those three days has lead me to an unexpected meditation on
generosity and empathy, one of those suprise tangents of an idea that isn’t planned when you begin writing and that wells up along the way. Montaigne taught
me it is worthwhile to veer and find out where these paths lead.
Sue and Linda did not know specifically what a pleasure teaching had been for me in the past. But even without knowing me they gave me something very specific
that I had been missing and needed for a long time. They were there sacrificing
an entire weekend away from home and family, giving away their time and energy
running through 30 exhausting hours of emotionally exacting course material.
They were passing along information and technique that we trainees took back to our homes across the state and used to help hundreds of people
hurting and looking for solace to calm their pain. Sue and Linda shared their
own sadness and vulnerability telling of tremendous loss in the face of mental
illness, but their sense of loss was tempered throughout by the example of hope
they showed in their actions, their patient and loving strength in confronting
hardship, and an implicit assurance that life was not over and that joy was
still possible, a joy they exemplified in the abundant flow of humor in their
absolutely hilarious banter all weekend.

There is a fascinating relationship here between general and
more specific forms of generosity. Sue and Linda made their general disposition
towards the world one of giving, and in doing so, they hit upon a very specific
need that was crucial to my recovery. I tend to think that understanding what a
person is going through needs to proceed acts of kindness, that we have to know
someone’s situation before can do unto them, that empathy makes generosity
possible. I wonder presently about the value of reversing these terms and
exploring the idea that generosity makes empathy possible. We may not
understand precisely what people are needing, but by adopting a general
disposition of kindness and giving away our time, our resources, our energy, we
might hit the mark anyway. Empathy is a wonderful thing. Maybe though it isn’t
always a necessary part of helping others. An act of kindness might be the
exact response someone else longs for even if we don’t know the details of that
longing before we make the gesture. Or it might be a bridge into a more
intimate and detailed understanding where empathy can take root. You may invite
me for dinner, and while talking during our meal, we may stumble together onto
the solution for a problem that’s been plaguing me for months.

Sue and Linda gave me the opportunity to present part of a
practice lecture on our first day of training. When I stood up, a little nervous,
and began to read, I discovered, with delight, that I could still project my voice like I had in
front of a classroom. The old aspiring educator roused and
steered up slowly to dock in the forefront of my mind. A refreshing light
penetrated the hall dimmed by dreary silence for so long. The subtle possibility for banquet renewed
and stirred up into my words. And as I came to the end of my section and reminded my fellow trainees that they had not caused the battles
raging in the minds of their family members, an older, better
version of me, that I’d once abandoned and left for dead, sat again welcomed and
laughing at the head of the table. With their dedication to
a cause and general disposition towards kindness, Sue and Linda had helped me
recover the teacher I wanted to be.

Stilt Walker

"It is an absolute, and divine-like, perfection to know how to loyally enjoy your being. We search out other conditions, while misunderstanding our own, and leave out from of our self, not knowing what it is made of. We climb so well onto stilts, but up on stilts we are still having to walk on our legs. And on the most lofty throne in the world we are still only sitting on our ass"--Montaigne 3.13